A while back and without much experience, and too much time to kill, after a little work I achieved top ranking for six of my websites for their main keyword phrases. And you know what? Back then it was easy, the main things were your meta tags and getting some links, it really was that simple. Mostly reciprocal links and all I had to do to get in the top three of my category was put my main keyword phrase in the link text. That’s all it took, it was so easy!

It had to happen eventually, the seceret got out and everyone else knew to put their best keywords in their links, and bam, page one SERP’s. The reciprocal link exchange boom was on. Link exchange services and software poped up like mushrooms after the rain.

I needed another edge so I started buying links, mostly run of site links. I’d have my best keyword in the ancor text on every page of a large site. I’d do this wit a couple of websites, and bam, right back on top. This was fantastic! Think about it, $100 every 30 days to get thousands of visitors every single day. Things were going great, I had tons of traffic and most of my competitors spending a fortune with Adwords for a small percentage of the traffic I was bringing in.

Once again everyone eventually discovered the power of buying text links, the race was on once again. It doesn’t take long to get the attention of the SE’s when everyone is abusing something that powerful, and once the SE’s put their sites on it. it’s over. So I looked at top ranking site’s for terms like shoes, clothes, gifts etc. Link exchange services and software poped up like mushrooms after the rain. O.K. now I’m pumped, I’ve just got to get one way links from relevant content pages and I’m back in the saddle again. But how am I going to get lots of people to give me a one-way link from a relevant content page?

Then it hit me, create a triangle of sites linking to each other, A would link to B, B would link to C and C would link to A, of course this will solve all my problems. How hard could it be?

I had no idea what I was getting into!

Talk about a nightmare!

After sending out hundreds of request and eventually getting two webmasters to agree the first issue I encountered was that they insisted on putting the links on spammy links pages that were almost impossible for a SE spider to find. Next big issue was webmasters that wanted two of their websites in the triangle, both of which had the same IP#, this was like putting putting up a flashing neon sign that read “Link Scheme”. Then there was quite a few shady operators who were actively seeking triangle links who wanted a good link from you, but wanted to link back from a link farm. What a nightmare this was turning into, almost a month and not one decent link. Where did I go wrong? And how the heck did I end up on this path to nowhere?

Now besides the headaches involved in trying to trick the search engines with schemes and black hat seo, there is a very real risk of having your site banned. It took me several years to figure out, but sometimes its easier to go with the flow and give the search engines what they want, like real and valuable content. It may seem like the slow hard way, but in the end you’ll see it’s the only way to succeed long term.

Next week we’ll exam ways to get quality one way links to your site.